1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to internet advertising, and more particularly, to providing rich media ads in search results to enrich a user's search experience.
2. Description of the Related Art
The computing industry has seen many advances in recent years, and such advances have lead to the rapid development of internet marketing and internet commerce. Due to the availability and growing popularity of internet marketing, advertisers and publishers have resorted to internet advertising for marketing their products or services. Internet advertising provides a number of advantages over traditional methods of advertising. It is a great marketing tool as it provides low cost advertising and greater flexibility in reaching out to a global audience. For an advertiser or publisher, internet advertising gives the opportunity to precisely target their audience and to customize the advertisements to each consumer's geographical region, interest, preference, taste, etc. Internet advertising also enables an advertiser or publisher to analyze the effectiveness of an advertisement by tracking user interaction with their advertisements. For a consumer, Internet advertising provides more direct interaction and provides easy and convenient access to wide array of products and services resulting in hassle-free shopping experience.
Internet advertising is normally presented to a user on a search page. A user looking for a certain product or service, uses the internet as a searching tool to search for the product and/or service. The user enters one or more search parameters into a search engine. The search engine searches the available inventory on the internet and returns a list of search results that match the entered search criteria. The search result is presented to the user in a search result page. A host of the search engine may allow a plurality of advertisers to advertise products, services or present informational messages alongside the search results on the search page in the form of sponsored advertisements with active links. These advertisements (ads) may be based on the search criteria or may include random advertisements. Most of the ads that are currently available on the web page are text based. With a text based ad, the amount of information an advertiser may be able to display in the ad is very limited due to the number of ads and limited amount of space available for each ad on the search result page. The advertiser may be able to overcome the space constraint by booking a larger space on the search page for displaying the ads. However, this might reduce the number of advertisements displayed on the search result page.
When an advertiser wants to provide additional information on a service or product, the advertiser has to place it within a sponsored link accessible to a user. Usually the sponsored link will take a user to a home page of the advertiser or to a web page that the advertiser has linked to the advertisement. These web pages are fairly static in nature and do not provide the ability to add content easily. Even if content is added to the home page or linked page, the user has to wade through the textual information provided in the home page or the linked page to get to additional information. Moreover, the additional information may not be based on the content of the advertisement, in which case rendering the additional information becomes challenging.
It is in this context that embodiments of the invention arise.